What may not be clear is that the original question had no Mma code. It was much more concise, namely question title: What are the semiaxes a, b, c, of an ellipsoid question body: with girths G_{bc},G{ca},G{ab}? That was closed due to "lack of context". After Bill added some context it was reopened a few hours later. That's one of the compromises currently in place to deal with students cheating on their homework. Most are so lazy that they simply copy and paste the exercise verbatim, resulting in PSQs (Problem Statement Questions) having the same form as Bill's original version above. Math.SE is by far the largest general-level math Q&A web site (over 1.1 million questions). The community is so large and heterogeneous that there there are extremely diverse viewpoints on site charter, politics, etc. Some users don't wan't to have anything to do with a site possibly perceived as a homework mill, while others believe it is not the site's job to enforce policies of external entities. Some want to use the site to teach, while others wish to build a library of "proofs from the book". To accommodate these diverse viewpoints required negotiating many compromises on these issues. As with any virtual community, to understand the need for various policies requires spending nontrivial time in the community. What may appear "moronic" at first glance, may make better sense after one has more experience. That's not to say that there are not foolish things that occur (the gamified nature of the platform certainly sparks such). But, alas, there's currently no better site for general level math Q&A. Nothing comes even remotely close as far as I know. Note: if you peruse it now for the first time, be aware that is is much slower now that classes are out for the summer (so you won't see as large a barrage of copy-pasted homework) On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 1:56 PM W. Edwin Clark <wclark@mail.usf.edu> wrote:
Perhaps the problem was the assumption that everyone speaks Mathematica. Try posing the question using standard English and standard mathematical notation.
On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 2:48 AM rwg <rwg@ma.sdf.org> wrote:
Comment length was a non-issue. I should've taken a screenshot. Five morons condemned me for being "off topic", threatening erasure in five days. Bill Dubuque's explanation of why they were grumpy with me nicely confirms that they're minimorons on a power trip.
On 2019-06-21 15:11, Tom Karzes wrote:
Most of these sites have a minimum comment length, so if your comment is shorter, you need to pad it out to achieve the minimum.
Tom
Fred Lunnon writes:
It's like any other social group --- initially, anything goes and there are no rules; but as time passes, certain patterns of behaviour become dominant, then codified by rules (possibly implicit but nevertheless progressively more rigidly enforced), and eventually any deviation is fiercely condemned.
Appeal to the original aims of the group will ignored, if not pronounced treasonous. The only solution is dissolution: long live Ivan Illich and the revolution!
I'm not going to ask why you wanted to spell "Exactly." with 15+ letters. But anyway how do you spell "hungry horse" with just 4 ?
I'll bite. —rwg
WFL
On 6/21/19, Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3268714/what-are-the-semiaxes-a-b-c...
—Bill
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