User:Solipsist
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| Name: | Solipsist |
| Location: | Cambridge, United Kingdom |
| Age: | Middle |
| Gender: | Male |
| On wikipedia since: | March 2004 |
| Interests: | Editor of the gaps and illustrating articles. |
| Also available at: | commons:User:Solipsist |
Declaration of POV
- I'm an atheist, but sometimes find religions interesting
- I'm a skeptic and oppose pseudoscience.
- I'm a liberal, but somewhat jaded towards politics
- I'm a mild deletionist
- I'm currently a sysop
- I'll add other biases as I think of them
Everyone has his/her own biases, and in general it is as well to be aware of them in yourself, so you can balance them out.
I previously had a list of subject areas in which I might have some knowledge, but I've noticed that although I have a science/engineering/computing background I haven't actually edited many articles in the technical domain. This is largely because those areas are already well served by many other Wikipedians. Instead I've ended up finding gaps in coverage and writing articles to fill them. Typically this seems to be in the areas of art, architecture, and biography. Quite often, if I've found a good free image that needs a home, I might end up writing a short article to give it somewhere to go. At the tail end, I might be tempted to expand or rewrite an article that I happen on using the Random Page link.
To an extent, I use writing Wikipedia articles as an aid to researching and learning about new things. At the moment this covers articles on 20C British artists and architecture. I'm no expert, but these are areas that I've been casually studying over the last 5 – 6 years.
If you enjoy copyediting, you might like to follow my larger rewrites. My spelling has improved since I was a child and I've a good grasp of grammar, but I still find it difficult to spot even obvious, major mistakes when proofreading a large edit. Actually, I'm not sure that I proofread at all. The first paragraph is usually OK, but then I get bored and probably just skim-read later sections.
[edit] Wikipedia doesn't work anymore
It used to be said that Wikipedia worked because, although it was vandalised all the time, that vandalism was quickly reverted. This no long seems to be true, or at least there are no longer enough good editors to balance out the bad editors. I expect that Wikipedia is still growing, but many existing articles are slowly deteriorating. I'll track some examples here as I come across them.
[edit] Monosodium Glutamate
As of Feb 2007, the article fails to mention the discoveror of MSG, Professor Kikunae Ikeda, and also fails to mention its connection to one of the biggest US food scares of all time, Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Both facts have been in the article a year ago, but have been missing for ages.
[edit] Digital photography
Indirectly, this photograph of a supernumerary rainbow is what prompted me to switch to digital photography last year. Many years ago, when I was in college, I had been fairly enthusiastic about photography and had a small SLR kit. I took some pretty good pictures, but the SLR was heavy to carry around, so I only took photographs when I was taking the time to go out and take photographs.
Some five years ago I picked up a compact camera, a μ-zoom. It was convenient to carry around and good for travelling, but really it was rubbish. It just didn't have the control to get exposures right and the the APS format is just too small. Pretty much every photograph I took with it was washed out and showed excessive grain. Those compact APS cameras were really just designed to take point-'n'-shoot pictures of friends and family, and that was about all they could manage.
Now being technologically minded, I had been tempted to get a digital camera for many years. The flip side being that I was also familiar with being suckered in to being an early adopter more times than I would care to confess. I was pretty convinced all the early 640x480 pixel cameras would be obsolete before you could open the box. And sure enough compact digital cameras have been racing along the technological curve as fast as anything. But last year I noticed that reviews were saying that the transition from 5 Mpixel cameras to 6 Mpixels wasn't helping the image quality much, largely because they were reaching the limits that compact lens optics could achieve.
However, what finally prompted me to buy a digital camera was seeing a supernumerary rainbow last year. Sometime around 1999, I read Greenler's Rainbows, Halos and Glories (ISBN 0521388651) and shortly after saw a double rainbow with an additional set of arcs inside the main bow. Having read Greenler I knew that tripple rainbows were theoretically impossible (although I hadn't read carefully enough to understand supernumerary bows). I was on a client's site at the time, so I didn't have a camera to hand, but afterwards, what really annoyed me was that I hadn't behaved as a good scientist and made written notes of details such as the order of colours in the third bow so that I might have a chance of understanding what I'd seen.
Then last year I saw another supernumerary rainbow. I was at home; I had time to grab the μ-zoom, but I had no film. I might have just had time to go and find the SLR, but that wouldn't have had film either. At least that time, I made written notes, and thanks to help from other Wikipedians was able to work out that it was a supernumerary bow. Of course, if I had had a digital camera, film wouldn't have been a problem.
So I bought a Canon S60 compact digital camera and it turned out to be a surprisingly good choice. Most especially because it zooms out to a wide angle view that is wider than average for a compact camera, which turns out to be quite important for architectural views. It is small enough that I carry it with me more often than not. It is capable of taking well detailed, high definition pictures and has sufficient manual control to cope with most difficult lighting conditions whilst also allowing creative exposure options. Its main limitations are a lack of a real telephoto zoom range and some significant difficulty in focusing acurately for closup semi-macro shots.
Then today I was working at home when I noticed the sun break through whilst it was still raining. Figuring that a rainbow was likely, I went outside with the Canon and an umbrella and was delighted to find it was another supernumerary rainbow — not nearly as strong as the previous two I had seen, but good enough to get some pictures. The photos have needed some pretty extreme contrast adjustment to make the additional arcs more visible (they were clearer to the naked eye), but at least they show the phenomenon. Chalk one up for digital photography.
I now suspect that supernumerary rainbows are not quite as rare as generally claimed, but rather that the additional arcs are usually rather faint and indistinct. Nevertheless, if you know to look out for them, you might see them more often.
[edit] Wiki-Link Game
I wrote the initial rules of the Wiki-Link Game, just one of many ways to use Wikipedia for fun, or to waste time, that can be found at the Department of Fun
[edit] Barnyard
[edit] Articles of the transmundane
[edit] Places
- Truth or Consequences, New Mexico - changed its name because a radio show passed through town.
- Riverside, Iowa - declared itself the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk
- Eyam - plague town on the edge of Derbyshire
- Alhambra - a favourite place
- Portmeirion - a fake Italianate village in north Wales, and the set for The Prisoner
- Uig, Lewis - location of the Lewis Chessmen
- Hiroshima, Hiroshima - target of the first atomic bomb
- Los Alamos - where the bomb was constructed
