User:Petwil

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Contents 1 Primary areas of expertise relevant to Wikipedia 2 Avocation 3 Beliefs relevant to Wikipedia 4 Language competency

[edit] Primary areas of expertise relevant to Wikipedia

Fluid dynamics (compressible and incompressible), magnetohydrodynamics, radiative transport, astronomy, optics, general physics, basics of history and physics of nukes, some CFD, basic numerical algorithms, enough math to satisfy your average theorist and make a true-blue mathematician see red.

[edit] Avocation

Physicist / astrophysicist / astronomer. Active researcher. Specialty: magnetohydrodynamics and turbulence modeling, applied to accretion disks/jets, stellar interiors. Also studies ISM, astrobiology, and radiatively imploded supercritical devices.

[edit] Beliefs relevant to Wikipedia

Mathematical Platonist; yet, I distrust excessive formalism not grounded in physical intuition. Theorist, yet, I distrust any physicist who doesn't have at least minimal competency in working on his/her car, house, or bicycle.

I do believe quite strongly that many (but not all!) of the problems in the US and in the world stem from ignorance. So, to that extent, I am happy to be part of Wikipedia (cue the music....).

[edit] Language competency

I actually used to be rather fluent in French, but that was many years ago. I live in the US, and there is not much opportunity to use French here if you do not live near Quebec. However, I can help with English-to-French or French-to-English translations. My competency in Spanish comes from living for a few years with some Colombian friends and living in the southwest of the US. Most people in the US tend to vastly overestimate their competency in other languages; I have tried to avoid this.

Here is my /worksinprogress

Fun with Boxes Wikipedia:Babel en This user is a native speaker of English. fr-2 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau moyen en français. es-1 Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel básico de español. Search user languages evol-4 This user is absolutely certain of the theory of evolution. for This user can program in Fortran. I studied computer programming in college, and all I got was this lousy compiler error.