"In astronomy, declination (abbreviated dec; symbol δ) is one of the two angles that locate a point on the celestial sphere in the equatorial coordinate system, the other being hour angle. The declination angle is measured north (positive) or south (negative) of the celestial equator, along the hour circle passing through the point in question."
Anyone who doesn't know what declination is, know from reading the introductory paragraph of this scientific Wikipedia article?
I've never heard of it before, and it makes perfect sense what it is from that intro.
On a celestial sphere (planet, star, etc) the declination angle (being 0 is at the equator, being 90 degrees is the north pole of the sphere, being -90 degrees, is at the south pole).
You also need another angle known as the "hour angle" to locate a point on the sphere. It doesn't explain what that is, but as can be seen on Wikipedia, you can easily click on that word to go to the entire page that explains what it is.
Well that was a whole other topic. And luckily it links to a page that explains the whole topic of what a "celestial sphere" is. Going to the page, I see I was indeed wrong about what it was, but now I see it is an abstract sphere, with a radius that can be whatever size you want, and that is centered on the Earth, or on the observer.
Once again, not so difficult to figure out even if you have no experience in the specific technical field of a Wikipedia article. So I have no idea what /u/casenmgreen's problem is.
> Anyone who doesn't know what declination is, know from reading the introductory paragraph of this scientific Wikipedia article?
Why should this be a metric one would want Wikipedia to meet? It's an encyclopedia, not an astronomy course.
Of course, the brilliance of Wikipedia is that if you think you can write a clearer intro, you can do so! You could even add it to the simple language version of the page - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declination
To be fair, most of the its difficulty is realized when you're stuck with a teammate rewriting history. Who, much like anyone anyone doing the same, hasn't bothered reading a book explaining things.
Not a single soul besides the one rewriting history knows what they're in for after the fact.
It's a recipe for disaster.
Unless you mean squashing commits, which I don't consider rewriting history, just a retelling of the fact. Still, it's something one can only do very sporadically, or at known periods of time. I
'm sure others would be more pedantic about it and this wasn't clear above.
Hardly anything modern about it, but it's a way of keeping a somewhat sane history. Certainly better than merging 'fix' 'fix' 'fix comments' into master.
The thing is, we could have done better (and have been) since before git even existed.
There are legit reasons to have a series of commits within one PR, and rebase and merge them as is, and use amend/fixup and force pushes to maintain them cleanly.
In some sense, git is actually like advanced zip versioning system. A commit is literally just a snapshot of code base except it tell you what is the previous version of this version.
Also, git store the files in a smarter way so file size won't explode like zip versioning.
On the other hand, the other part of git aren't really strictly work only for git. Create and apply diff also works for plain folder without git history. They are big part of the ecosystem while not bound to git in a strict way either.
